Catherine Parsonage – House of Egorn

b. 1989, Wirral; lives and works in London.

Catherine Parsonage received her MA from the Royal College of Art in London after studying Fine Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has been included in prestigious awards for young artists such as Bloomberg New Contemporaries and the Catlin Prize. This year she has been selected for the Sainsbury Scholarship in Painting and Sculpture to spend one year working at the British School in Rome.

“Throughout her practice, Parsonage has pursued the ultimate reduction of the female form; condensing the body to its most elementary essence through single deft lines, where subtle shifts in weight and angle are imbued with movement and poise. On her studio wall there is a black and white John Galliano photograph torn from a magazine, an androgynous figure swathed in mesh fabric, bent over his knee in pensive thought. The carefully choreographed mise- en-scene; balancing line and form; speaks as much about that which is unsaid or invisible as that which it reveals. The concentrated content enthralls, provoking the viewer to reinterpret the image time and again. There is a sensibility in this distilled image which – whilst aesthetically disparate – resonates with Parsonage’s treatment of the body in her work. Dividing the canvas, her suggestive but not conclusive, gestural lines exploit the relationship between positive and negative spaces, allowing a slippage between perspectives and views. Through erasure, withdrawal and paring back of form, she creates a space in which implication becomes the driving force. Her fragmentary figures speak to the writing of Jean-Luc Nancy, for whom bodies do not exist in space, but are space itself. In his essay, Fifty-eight Indices on the Body, he states: ‘there’s never any incorporation, but always exits, twists, openings-out, channelings or disgorging’s, crossings, balancings… there’s no totality to the body, no synthetic unity. There are pieces, zones, fragments.’1 Parsonage’s works draw on this fallacy of the body as an absolute. As Nancy’s body exists of spasms, contractions and unfoldings, Parsonage’s figures take form in her physical relationship to the canvas. The simplicity of her marks are brought into existence in the agility and brevity of their movements, stretches, turns and their subsequent relationship to the potential whole.” – Sophie J. Williamson, 2015.

EXHIBITIONS

2018
As I took her arm she stared through my face at the dark branches of the trees over my head, curated by Michael Lawton, Yellow, Varese (group)

2017
Full For It, Garbo's, Rome (duo)
June Mostra, British School at Rome (group)
ARTISSIMA, Back to the Future, House of Egorn, Turin (solo)
Le Nouveau Voyeurisme, Secondo Pensiero, Corso Magenta 12, Milano (group)
March Mostra, British School at Rome (group)

2016
December Mostra, British School at Rome, Rome (group)
GRANPALAZZO, Palazzo Rospigliosi. Rome. Bosse and Baum (solo)
Art Rotterdam, House of Egorn (solo)
a wrist that turns, House of Egorn, Berlin (solo)

2015
Rhythm, Movement, Caesura, Vesta Kroese & Catherine Parsonage, Lychee One, London (duo)
2014
Bloomberg New Contemporaries, World Museum. Liverpool (group)
Manchester Contemporary: Rogue Project Space, Granada Studios (group)
Alex Mackin Dolin, Catherine Parsonage, Amalia Ulman, Studiolo, Spazio Cabinet, Milan Group Presentation at London Art Fair 2014 with FOLD Gallery (group)

2013
I DID DID I, Howard Dyke, Kate Groobey, Dominic Kennedy, Catherine Parsonage, Kes Richarson ASC Gallery, London (group)
21st Century & Design RCA - 2013, Christies, London (group)
Royal College of Art. MA Degree Show, London (group)
Honeymoon, The Triangle Space, Chelsea School of Art & Design, London (group)
RCA Secret, Dyson Gallery, London (group)
RCA Notes to Self, Dyson Gallery, London (group)

2012
RCA Interim, Henry Moore Gallery, London (group)
RCA Secrets, Henry Moore Gallery, London (group)
BP Portrait Award, National Portrait Gallery, London, Wolverhampton, Glasgow (group)